How does total value of bitcoin compare with money supply of Peru, Turkey, Tajikistan and China?

It’s been commonly reported in the media that the total value of bitcoin in circulation is well over $1 billion. But what does that mean? For bitcoin, this is normally calculated by market capitalization, which is a figure that is normally attributed to the total valuation of a stock. You take the total shares outstanding and multiply that by the stock price. Google, for example, currently has a stock price of $866.39 as of 26th August. Multiply that price by 333.22 million shares, and you get a market cap number of $288.6 billion for the company. Personally, I’ve long been wary of calculating bitcoin by market cap. The reason? It’s not a stock, and behaves much differently which makes it hard to determine valuation in that way. Recently, however, a report by the International Monetary Fund regarded bitcoin as a “private currency” . Indeed, around the same time the German ...